THE EXCLUSIVELY PRENOMINAL ADJECTIVES IN PORTUGUESE

Abstract

The exclusively prenominal adjectives in Portuguese, or even in other romance languages, are treated superficially in the literature about adjectives. We don’t know much about these adjectives, their properties and why they exist. This paper seeks to take a few steps forward in this discussion. The properties mentioned currently in literature are, actually, a confusion between properties of fixed position adjectives and prenominal adjectives in general. After discussing data, we show two salient properties: exclusively prenominal adjectives do not occur in NP in Portuguese, but just in DPs (and it evidences that they are generated in a higher position of the structure); the meaning of these adjectives are independent from the noun (which means that these adjectives are not selected by the noun, but they syntactically select the noun instead). These distinctions indirectly show arguments in favor of the adjunction of other adjectives on the right side.

Keywords

• Exclusively prenominal adjectives.
• Adjectives in Portuguese.
• Adjectives as heads.